You spent New Year’s Eve with your family and friends. Lt. Larkin O’Hern spent his leading an infantry platoon of the 101st Airborne Division serving in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Your biggest concern that day was determining which parties you would go to and how to get home safely. O’Hern, a West Point graduate, was clearing a Taliban compound near the village of Howz-e-Madad and trying to get his men back to their forward operating base safely.

As they were preparing to leave, an engineer attached to O’Hern’s platoon located a hidden cache of pressure plates used to construct IEDs. As O’Hern approached to investigate the find, a plate being handled by the engineer exploded.

The engineer was killed instantly. The blast blew O’Hern’s left leg off completely. His right leg was barely attached below the knee. His right hand was mutilated. Bleeding profusely and in excruciating pain, it seemed the only question was whether O’Hern would be the final U.S. death in Afghanistan of 2010, or the first of 2011.

A 101st Airborne medevac team arrived and flew O’Hern to the hospital at Bagram Air Base. Then it was on to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and ultimately to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio.

O’Hern, a triple amputee, survived. “I had great doctors all the way along. I’m very blessed,” he says. After multiple surgeries and months of grueling rehabilitation at the Center for the Intrepid, he stood up on May 18 for the first time since New Year’s Eve.

About his brush with death, O’Hern has a light-hearted attitude. “IEDs are bad for trucks, and they’re even worse for people.” About the attention he gets as an obvious casualty of war who is also an officer from West Point, he’s more somber.

Patients at the Center for the Intrepid participate in what are known as community reintegration outings — activities that participants will enjoy but that also force them to interact, use their prosthetics and test their rehabilitation skills. Something as simple as handling money is a challenge.

“I feel bad,” O’Hern told me. “We’ll go out to eat with my friends that are in the military, short haircuts. Every single time, people come up to me and they’re like, ‘Oh, are you in the service?’ And I’m like, ‘Yes, and so is he and so is he and so is he.’ And every one of them was just as willing to go through this as me.

“The Purple Heart is the wrong place, wrong time award,” he notes self-deprecatingly. “But everybody who signs on the line and goes over there knows that this is the threat that they face and took all the same risks.”

O’Hern has two more years of rehabilitation ahead of him. A track and cross country athlete at Belton High School in Texas, he expects to walk and run again.

“I want to stay in the Army,” he says. “If everything works out right, I plan to leave here in the summer of 2013, enroll in graduate school in the fall … two years of graduate school, and then I’d like to go back and teach at West Point. That’s something that I wanted to do even before I got hurt.”

O’Hern might easily have been killed on New Year’s Eve, his name another in a long list of those who have given their lives in service to their country. This Memorial Day, how will you honor the fallen?

As I visited with O’Hern and his wife, Rachel, last week, he was preparing to fly to Fort Campbell, Ky., courtesy of the non-profit Veterans Airlift Command. His battalion is rotating home this weekend. O’Hern will be there to surprise his band of brothers and welcome them back — standing.